The fictional world of British writer C. D. Rose is one that slips in and out of time, balancing the fantastic and the realistic, peopled with the lonely, the lost, and the brilliant misfits, some drawn from history, others from his expansive imagination. His universe is at once familiar and strange, and as is the case with the best literary fables, it offers a welcome refuge in a troubled world. At least, that was what I found after floundering with attempts to lose myself in prose during a busy, stressful stretch. Rose’s short story collection Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea turned out to be the perfect antidote to a reading slump.
Central to this collection of nineteen tales is the idea and experience of time—tracking its passage, defying its constraints, longing to hold it fast. Rose’s characters often have a most awkward relationship with time. The protagonist of “Everything is Subject to Motion, and Everything is Motion’s Subject,” for example, nineteenth century French physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey, in a narrative that flows with the imagery of his two obsessions, circulation and the pursuit of the fine details of movement, feels himself divorced from any perception of time beyond the immediate:
In life, this tangle. His constant passage from Paris to Naples, Naples to Paris. The demands of work, love, money pushing him one way and pulling him the other. A life always in transition, never stopping, always moving. Always in the present tense. Were he to stop and think of the past or the future, what would happen? When and where, he sometimes thinks, will I finally rest? His life like his pictures: tracing a motion back and forth across Europe.
Elsewhere, philosopher Henri Bergson, defender of primacy of immediate experience, finds himself caught a warped time loop of maids and spilled tea in “Henri Bergson Writes About Time.” Or in “Violins and Pianos are Horses,” an unnamed composer fitfully tries to reclaim his past on a visit with his daughter to the town he grew up in. Memories beset him during their stay, but the childhood home he remembers remains elusive, while all his fame and achievements are cold comfort.
Sometimes time takes on a surreal, even ghostly, quality in Rose’s fables. At other times, he leans hard into the absurd. “The Neva Star,” for example features three Russian sailors, all named Sergei, who have stubbornly (or perhaps foolishly) stayed aboard their ship, abandoned by its owners to rust in a port in Naples. In the charming “Arkady Who Couldn’t See and Artem Who Couldn’t Hear,” the narrator passes a long train trip across the snow-covered Russian landscape in the company of an odd pair of twins, one blind, one deaf, who are engaged in the careful construction of a matchstick model of their childhood home—a collaborative effort to remember their birthplace:
They were thin men, curiously built, with long square bodies and short legs, but both moved with a careful grace, their slow, deliberate gestures reminding me of mime artists or expert craftsmen. When I asked how long they had been building their model, they looked at each other and smiled. All our lives, said Arkady, all our lives.
The stories the brothers share about their lives conflict depending on which twin is doing the telling and whether the other is asleep, but it is clear that neither intends to allow their life project to come to completion. As if one can preserve time so it never truly passes. But, of course, time has its own designs.
Rose crafts many of his tales over the biographies of real people—photographers, scientists, writers, philosophers—stretching, reshaping, and imagining them from the inside looking out at a world that moves too quickly, too slow, or too strangely. Other narratives tend to similarly feature protagonists, narrators or characters that connect with temporal reality in idiosyncratic ways. And some seem to defy time and conventional narration altogether, like the experimental “What Remains of Claire Blanck” in which the narrative has all but evaporated leaving only footnotes, their numbers hanging against empty space above a detailed literary analysis of a story that can no longer be read. The nature of storytelling, how or if one can or even should write about a particular subject, also preoccupies certain narrators or protagonists, but again, that is a theme not inseparable from time.
Writing this review on the day that the new pope, an American of the Augustinian order, has been elected and the curious have been scrolling through his twitter account to gather a sense of the man, it’s some strange coincidence that the funniest, most affectionately absurd title in this collection is “St Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed.” In this brief tale the saint struggles with the temptation of social media, fretting about likes and the lack of a blue check mark, as he tries to focus on beginning to write his confessions. This clever little piece works, as do the others in this collection of intelligent, wide ranging fables, because Rose has a keen sense of just how long a story should be based on its level of absurdity and relative complexity. Frequently that is no more than a few pages. His mastery of the form is impressive, bringing to mind writers like Italo Calvino, Magdelena Tulli, and, of course, Borges, and yet his voice is distinct and contemporary and this collection a delight.
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C. D. Rose is published by Melville House.
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